


Atonement

by ImhereImQuire



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post - A Dance With Dragons, flagellation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-13
Updated: 2013-02-13
Packaged: 2017-11-29 03:59:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/682511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImhereImQuire/pseuds/ImhereImQuire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Cersei's execution a broken hearted Lancel seeks penitence for his sins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Atonement

They say that grief makes one insensible to pain, that the body shuts itself down and becomes as stone. There is perhaps something in it, but people who say that have just not been hit hard enough.

The lash falls again, and again, and he feels  the explosion upon his back as a series of fine edged and precise burns and it hurts, of course it hurts, how could it not hurt… but it doesn’t hurt enough, and after he takes the customary dozen he takes only a moment to get back his breath before he straightens himself.

“Again,” he demands between gritted teeth. “Harder.”

The sacred brother behind him hesitates, and he raises his voice, insistent. “Again.  Harder.”

He grasps the posts for support and his back is once more aflame, punishment for other lines his back once wore, claw marks from a lioness.  It’s not enough, he decides. It can’t be enough if he can still think of her now. “Harder.”

“Any harder and the skin will break-“

“Harder. See that it does. The father’s judgement is not gentle,” he growls, taking deep gasping breaths to compose himself, fighting tears which have nothing to do with his welts. She despised weakness, he thought to himself. She said that a man must be a man.

The first strike is not so much harder to bear, not really, but it is the beginning, and the blows as they come now are harder, and the skin is not just raised now, but splits beneath the force of the lash. He swallows his noise, for the most part.

This is nothing, he tells himself. This is nothing compared to the knowledge of what he has done, and it is nothing compared to what he deserves, and it is nothing compared to the knowledge that she is gone.

“Further,” he hisses, and there is some quiet hesitation but the penitence of the holy is an affair between the gods and the man, and he gets as he has demanded, again and again until his back is a mass of crimson lines, the skin parting to bare the meat beneath. 

He cries out and hates himself for it, for he remembers that she did not, though perhaps that was more down to the speed of the sword; her neck was so slender that it was all over in a moment. Except it wasn’t over, really, not for him. When he prays in the sept now he always finds himself stood somewhere between the Mother and the Maid, and the only thing he prays for is forgiveness, forgiveness that never comes.

He eats only as pressed, his dreams are slow to come, then tormented, and the blinding pain he feels at the penitent’s post is the closest thing to peace he knows.

It will soon be at an end though; they have Jaime now, and his cousin has chosen single combat, to the surprise of no one. Lancel knows that as a crippled ruin he cannot truly hope to win, but as the champion of the Seven he has ideas of his own.  Cersei could not truly die while Ser Jaime lived, that was what she claimed, and he had atonement to make.  Perhaps he would be forgiven then, and perhaps he would not, but the hope that he might die and give her company until she was reunited with her twin was all he had, and Lannisters always paid their debts.


End file.
